In traditional radio systems, it is usually the goal of a transmitter to run as loudly as possible in order to maximize transmit distance. Some radio systems, such as cellular systems, use feedback between tower and client devices to minimize the transmit power needed by the client, primarily to extend the battery life of a mobile client.
In a peer-to-peer mobile mesh network, however, power management becomes exponentially more complex as many radio nodes may be in motion, moving within and out of radio signal ranges and are subject to differing spatial, climatic, topographical and other influencers. Traditionally, it has been necessary to have at least one node in a system transmitting loudly enough so that all nodes in the system are able to remain in the network due to the requirement to have a centralized or master node to manage the network. But transmitting too loudly will create interference for some nodes that can overwhelm nearby mesh nodes, waste power, and leave the nodes unable to remain in the network. And when scaling to very large node counts (e.g., into the hundreds of individual nodes), a mesh network needs to take advantage of frequency reuse, i.e., when different parts of the network independently use the same frequencies without interference. In addition, in a highly mobile mesh network, nodes are moving relative to each other most of the time, so that power control has to dynamically adapt to a constantly changing network. The present disclosure defines a distributed power transmit management methodology that implements transmission power management on a peer-to-peer basis, and thereby keeps all nodes accessible, dynamically adapts to changes in the network, maximizes frequency reuse, and reduces power requirements to maximize network performance while minimizing interference.